Trouble is that I’m not sure that most women looking at this line-up of ‘famous faces’ and notable women – which happens to feature Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, the campaigner and mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and TV chef Rachel Khoo – is going to recognise any of them.

Maybe it’s the clothes. Maybe it’s the airbrushing. Maybe it’s the ever-so-slightly-awkward posing (is Emma Thompson delivering the soliloquy from Hamlet, you have to wonder, missing only Yorrick’s skull?). She’s perhaps saying: ‘PC, or not PC…?’, referring the clearly intentional diversity of the line-up – which isn’t what I want to address here (because there are plenty of other people online right-now-this-minute going down that route, and it ain’t pretty).

No, my issue is that this ad definitely needs a caption in order for any ‘ordinary’ person to make out who’s who - and maybe further annotation to explain why they were chosen. Otherwise I’m not sure that this cast is in with a chance of triggering a stampede to M&S - which is clearly the company’s chief executive Marc Bolland’s hope and dream, poised as M&S is to lose its position as Britain’s supremo high street retailer to John Lewis(sales figures around £9 billion), and even Next, whose £695 million profits are predicted to be £67 million higher than M&S’s when they’re announced in May.

And even if we do flock back, will women find what they’re looking for? I’d say it’s the clothes themselves which are the real problem, in this ad. The three on the right in the image at the top of this piece (Annie Lennox, Emma Thompson and Baroness Lawrence) look like nothing so much as a cosmeto-dermatologists’s white-coated clinic assistants, preparing to launch themselves at someone’s wrinkles with syringes-ful of Botox. (Or maybe they already have - and that’s why all of the women appear so eerily line-free.) You’ve got to be model and campaigner Alek Wek’s height – over six foot – to carry off a splashy-printed frock like the one she’s wearing, while any TV chef worth her Maldon (sorry Rachel Khoo) would generally give a white, clingy two-piece a wide berth unless it came with a massive matching apron.

I’ll admit: after thefanfare and kerfuffle over the last series of ads, I did head back to M&S. I had a jolly good look around. Bought some knickers. Sprung for six identical pairs of (impressively fab and perfect) stretch denim bootleg jeans, for a steal-like £15 each, which could potentially have meant I didn’t need to set foot inside M&S for some years to come. To me, this is what M&S is best at, and needs to remain best at. Because most of my circle – in M&S’s heartland – complain that in trying to jazz up its image, M&S has become too finger-on-the-fashion-pulse, asking: can it really be so hard to design clothes which manage to find that middle ground between ‘elasticated-waist frumpy’ and ‘fashion victim’? Clearly yes is the answer, because whenever I do visit the store, I can’t seem to see them. (As I beat a path to the enduringly enticing food department...)

Personally, I still have my doubts that catwalk-inspired/fashion-forward is the way to go for this retailer. Items like Alek Wek’s splashy dress will shriek ‘M&S’ to anyone at 30 paces (as did thatdarned pink coat, this winter) – and has the chain regained sufficient cachet for us to want to announce to the world that’s where we shop…? Hmmm. If I was running M&S – oh, the fun of an if-I-ruled-the-world game – I’d turn it into a Gap for grown-ups, with brilliant basics, sleeves-with-everything, Boden-esque macs, proper tailored trousers (cut-offs? Really? Even Rita Ora doesn’t look great in these…). And more, too, of the nifty, affordable little cashmere cardies which is what the women I know are actually stocking up on, from this chain.

Then I’d build from there. Great cutting. Quality fabrics. And no, of course we won’t need to replace them every season – in order to ensure we look like we’ve just stepped from the pages of Vogue. But we’d buy those wardrobe staples from M&S, way, way more than we are at the moment.

Bottom line? I’d turn away from the catwalk, set my sights on getting back those ‘Middle England’ John Lewis customers (who’ve almost certainly defected from M&S in their droves) – and start creating clothes for real women (and I definitely don’t mean the ‘surrreal’ line-up here) to wear.